Learning building science—or anything really—takes determination. My friend Jay always tells people when he's teaching them to juggle that picking up that skill takes only two things: wanting to do it and spending time practicing. Learning building science—or anything really—takes…
You can install a radon vent the hard way. Or you can install one the easy way. I discovered in Nashville a couple of weeks ago that home builders there prefer to do it the easy way. That is, they…
"ASHRAE 62 is the only national consensus standard document there is. Follow 62.2. Resistance is futile." So said Dr. Max Sherman last summer in a presentation for the Building America Technical Update meeting. (Download pdf official report here.) That statement…
"A New Zealand technician got fire balled in the face," a member of the HVAC-talk.com forum stated bluntly. He was referring to a case where an HVAC tech got burned when he thought he was working on a system with…
Guest post by Leigha Dickens, Green Building Coordinator for Deltec Homes, who earlier this year was a student in our home energy rater class. Guest post by Leigha Dickens, Green Building Coordinator for Deltec Homes, who earlier this year was…
I think I first heard the term greenwashing in 1990, as I was getting ready for the big 20th anniversary Earth Day event in Tarpon Springs, Florida. 'Green' was starting to get some traction as a marketing term meaning 'environmentally-friendly'…
I've seen a lot of nasty crawl spaces. I've squirmed through their squalor and squeezed through their narrow confines. Possums, snakes, spiders, and camel crickets have kept me company in the dank, musty underworlds that so many people live above.…
Air conditioners use refrigerants to move heat from inside your home to the outdoors. The old refrigerants were bad for the ozone layer in the stratosphere. The first replacement, R-22, is better but was meant to be used only as…
ASHRAE† is meeting in Denver this week, and my friend Robert Bean, the mastermind behind the Healthy Heating website, tweeted the other day that they're going on a tour of NREL's new net zero energy building. I'd love to go—both…
In my last article, I explained some of the basic science of phase changes, referencing the Wicked Witch of the West and the phase change she underwent when Dorothy threw water in her face in The Wizard of Oz. (I've…